Okay thinking ahead to another part of a masterplan for one of my sites. Are subdomains any good for seo purposes? take my site www.countycricketclubs.co.uk for example. If i were to create a mini-site for each team to drive traffic to my forum would subdomains like: www dot somerset.countycricketclubs.co.uk be good to use or would i be better using pages like www dot countycricketclubs.co.uk/somersetcountycricketclub/index.html Thanks in advance for any help!
Google will see the subdomain as a seperate site, but to be honest it really doesn't make much difference. With subdomains all linking to the main site G can easily see that the sites are part of a network anyway, and PR is passed equally from links on subpages and subdomain pages. Go with whichever makes more sense to you in terms of site organisation and structure.
I'm thinking a subdomain of xxxx.countycricketclubs might be good because county cricket clubs is a good keyword, do keywords in subdomains carry weight?
Yes, they do. But it'll also dilute the keywords in the main domain url a little. On the other hand, it's likely that Google gives weight to page names and directory names too, although not as much. (We're talking about very small amounts of weight here anyway) I really think that there won't be enough of a difference between the two in SEO terms to worry too much about it.. but if I were in your position I'd use the subdomain option, simply because I think users would feel slightly more 'individually catered for'. Also, if you're planning offline advertising, IMHO urls look neater and easier to remember with subdomains instead of individual page names.
Thanks for your help so far. I'm thinking of using subdomains but.... What about passing PR to the different pages? I'd like each page to link to all the others.
PR is based on pages and not sites, so PR will be passed just as well through links between different sub-domains as links between different pages on the same domain.
I agree with taulath in regards to most of the points he has made in the sense that it does not make much difference for seo purposes. Although since a subdomain is treated as a different site, that 'site' will have to start again in regards to pagerank, whereas if you use the subdir approach it would feed of the main site PR, perhaps dropping a pr point with each dir level. From a purely user point of view I think sudomains is the better choice.
But pagerank is calculated on a per-page basis, not by site. Although yes sometimes the PR toolbar will show "top level pagerank -1" for sub directories, this is actually just a 'guess' by the toolbar, and not an actual pagerank at all.
I think subdomains look better, and give you the opportunity for expansion later if you want to give each club its own proper mini site. I don't think it makes much of a difference to Google though, and of course you have to create new DNS records for each subdomain (or use a wildcard).
But does pr gained purely by content not spread itself out to all pages on a 'site'. A separate site may be percieved has having little content. Forgetting about PR for a sec (as it is actually only a part of the algo), since we know Google loves content rich sites, could this not be damaging, even in the slightest way?
Again, PR is calculated on purely a page by page basis - the only way that PR is spread about a site is because most sites have navigation links to all their content and pagerank is passed via these links. Google does not care how one page in your site spreads that PR, whether its to other pages in your site, other subdomains in your site, or even totally different sites. The fact that most websites have navigation menus that pretty effectively spread the PR from one page around your site makes a lot of webmasters believe that your site is seen as 'linked' in PR terms by Google. This just isn't the case. If a page has a PR5, 4 navigation links and a link to another website, the PR 'vote' from that page will get split up, 20% given to each of the 5 links on your page. It doesn't matter if these links are to sub-domains or whatever. PR aside, the only reason I can see having subdomains as being damaging is that there is evidence to suggest that Google can understand the 'theme' of an entire site and this may slightly affect SERP's for individual pages on your site. Having multiple sub-domains may dilute any benefits this has if your sub-domains don't have enough content each for Google to understand it's theme.
sub domain it is then. I'm sure it would be easier and nicer for your cricket club owners to use anyhow. One more thing then, if subdomain is treated as a different sites do interlinks between full domain and sub domain still count as internal or will full link 'credit' be given as if they where two different domains altogether. Perhaps Google will still check the ip range and notice the closness between domain and subdomain, assuming each sub domain gets a ip, which might not be the case.
I'll be going down the subdomain route. There will be to begin with 18 mini-sites for each county team that competes in English First Class cricket. I'll come back and let you know how i get on with getting the pages indexed etc.